“There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we’ve been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We’ve never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It’s everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it’s from atomic tests; but it’s said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.”

Staying on the sound and music theme, behold Soundbreaking, an “eight-part series [that] explores the art of music recording, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of brand new sounds. Featuring more than 160 original interviews with some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time.” [Thanks, Reader F.]

Today in 1923, South African writer, activist and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Nadine Gordimer is born outside Johannesburg. The daughter of a passive Russian refugee father and an activist mother, Gordimer would go on to write more than a dozen novels (at least three of which were banned in South Africa) and close to two dozen collections of short fiction, almost all of which probed the subtleties of race, love and politics in South Africa. Winner of practically every major literary award (and recipient of 15 honorary degrees), Gordimer joined the African National Congress when it was illegal to do so, advised Nelson Mandela during his trial and was active in the anti-apartheid movement and many post-apartheid causes. “The truth isn’t always beauty,” Gordimer would write in The London Magazine, “but the hunger for it is.”

“… In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer and a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats’s beast slouching to be born.”

This week’s WATCH from Reader B., who writes, “It is the movie ►A Thousand Clowns based on the play that preceded it. A sleeper. A masterpiece. It was a major inspiration to me and here it is in its entirety. I don’t know why it is available for free, nor for how long, but this great play/movie is hard to find and see, don’t miss the chance.”

In 1961, Roald Dahl hosted a Twilight Zone-alike television show called Way Out (the title screen says ‘Way Out; I don’t know what that’s about)…a show created quickly to replace Jackie Gleason’s failed talk show You’re In the Picture. All of this just as weird as it sounds. Fortunately for us, the ►entire one-year run is available on YouTube.

Incidentally, when I say Gleason’s show failed, I mean it was a serious fail: instead of airing the second episode, which was already in the can, Gleason appeared on television to apologize. “Last week we did a show that laid the biggest bomb—it would make the H-bomb look like a two-inch salute,” he said, later adding, “You don’t have to be Alexander Graham Bell to pick up the phone and find out it’s dead.”